New Racials and Warlords of Draenor Dev Watercooler: Design Philosophy

Today the Blizzard devs explain some of the design philosophies behind changes in Warlords of Draenor, with additional information on Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns changes.

Some racials are getting changed--some that have hit and expertise boosts need to be changed as those stats won't exist, and others are simply too strong.

The item squish is coming because player power has really gotten out of control--Blizzard even made handy graphs showing it!

Abilities are getting removed in Warlords to reduce complexity and bloat--some are passives, others are class-wide abilities that really should be for one spec.

There is too much Crowd Control in the game. Many CC spells are getting removed, disarms are gone, and the number of Diminishing Returns categories are reduced.

After this blog was posted, which mostly covered old information, several Blizzard devs on twitter answered questions from players--revealing new information in the process. We liveblogged the highlights and organized them here because Twitter is pretty messy for this sort of information!

New Racial Information

Technical Game Designer Celestalon also answered more specifics about new racials on his Twitter, such as "Weapon Specialization racials are removed because Hit/Exp are removed." Source:

Dwarf: Lost and Might of the Mountain. Gained Might of the Mountain, a passive which adds 2% Crit Damage. Also... A change to Stoneform: Also removes Magic/Curse. HOWEVER, it still cannot be used while CC'd. (It is still NOT a CC-break) Source

Night Elves: Quickness also increases movement speed by 2% passively. They also got a new passive which is quite unique... (Remember, no more haste breakpoints!) Touch of Elune, a new passive which grants 1% Haste at night, 1% Crit during the day. SourceShadowmeld is unchanged. Source

Abilities and Itemization

Celestalon and Holinka also answered questions on the ability bloat and general ability changes:

Q: Regarding removing CDs, which is likely gonna be cut for Ferals Berserk or Tiger Fury or both? A: Both of those are staying. Tiger's Fury is on the border between feeling like a DPS cooldown and a rotational button. Source

Q: I understand if this is too specific. Re pet-cast CC: Freeze going away? If so, room for a non-CC replacement? A: Water Elemental Freeze is staying. However, there is a minor talent that teaches Squirt a new spell that shares a cooldown with it Source

Blizzard

Development on World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor is progressing well, and we'll soon be ready to enter the first phases of public testing. To help prep you for battle, let’s break down some of the upcoming changes we’re making to stats, abilities, and crowd control for the expansion.

Stat Squish

Character progression is one of the hallmarks of any role-playing game, and naturally that means we're always adding more power for players to acquire. After multiple expansions and content updates, we've reached a point where the numbers for health, damage, and other stats are so big they’re no longer easy for players to grasp. What’s more, a lot of power granularity is tied up in tiers of older content, from Molten Core to Dragon Soul—and while it was once necessary for your character's power to spike up suddenly when you hit level 70, that’s not the case anymore.

In order to bring things down to a more understandable level, we'll be reducing the scale of stats throughout the game and smoothing out those obsolete spikes, so that power scales linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 85. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear . . . everything. And while that means your numbers for stats and damage are being reduced by a huge amount, the same goes for creatures' health and damage output. For example, a Fireball that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of his 3,000,000 health (15% of its health) may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health).

It's important to understand that this isn’t a nerf—in effect, you’ll still be just as powerful, but the numbers that you see will be easier to comprehend. This also won’t reduce your ability to solo old content. In fact, to provide some additional peace of mind, we're implementing further scaling of your power against lower-level targets so that earlier content will be even more accessible than it is now.

We’re also removing all base damage on player spells and abilities and adjusting attack power or spell power scaling as needed, making it so that all specializations will scale at the same rate.

Racial Traits

We want races to have fun and interesting perks, but if some of those traits are too powerful, players may feel compelled to play a specific race even if it’s not really the one they want to play. For example, Trolls' Berserking ability was extremely powerful, and their Beast Slaying passive was either completely irrelevant or tremendously powerful, based on the situation, compared to other racial traits. On the other end of the spectrum, many races had few or no performance-affecting perks. On top of that, a number of racials that currently grant Hit or Expertise will soon need replacing, since those stats are being removed in Warlords of Draenor.

To keep racials more in line with one another, we’ve decided to bring down the couple high outliers, then establish a fair baseline and bring everyone else up to that. We’re accomplishing this by improving old passives, replacing obsolete ones, and adding a few new ones where necessary. Ultimately, our goal is to achieve much better parity among races.

Ability Pruning

Over the years, we've added significantly more new spells and abilities than we've removed, and the game’s complexity has steadily increased. We’re to the point now where players are starting to get overwhelmed, sometimes feeling like they need dozens of keybinds (in a few extreme cases, over a hundred). While the game is loaded with niche abilities that could theoretically be useful in some rare scenario, in reality, many of these are barely used at all—and in some cases, the game would simply be better off without them.

For Warlords of Draenor, we decided that we needed to pare down the number of abilities available to each class and spec in order to remove some of that unnecessary complexity. That means restricting some abilities to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that we can merged with other passives or base abilities.

This doesn’t mean that we want to reduce the depth of gameplay or dumb things down. We still want players to face interesting decisions during combat, and we still want skill to matter . . . but we can achieve that without the needless complexity in the game now, and we can remove some of the game’s more convoluted mechanics while maintaining depth and skill variety.

One type of ability that we focused on removing is temporary power buffs (aka "cooldowns"). Removing these also helps achieve one of our other goals, which is to reduce the amount of cooldown stacking in the game. In cases where a class or spec has multiple cooldowns that typically end up getting used together (often in a single macro), we merged them, or removed some of them entirely.

The process of determining which spells and abilities to cut or change is a very complex one—we know that every ability feels vital to someone, and we don't take this process lightly. Even if we ended up cutting your favorite ability, we hope you’ll understand why we did so in the context of our larger goals for the expansion. Ultimately, the point of these changes is to increase players' ability to understand the game, not to reduce gameplay depth.

Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns

One other big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there is currently simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game, especially when it comes to PvP. To address that, we knew that we needed an across-the-board disarmament. Here's a summary of the player-cast CC changes:

Removed Silence effects from interrupts. Silence effects still exist, but are never attached to an interrupt.

Removed all Disarms.

Reduced the number of Diminishing Returns (DR) categories.

All Roots now share the same DR category.

Exception: Roots on Charge-type abilities have no DR category, but have a very short duration instead.

All Stuns now share the same DR category.

All Incapacitate (sometimes called "mesmerize") effects now share the same DR category and have been merged with the Horror DR category.

Removed the ability to make cast-time CC spells instant with a cooldown.

Removed many CC spells entirely, and increased the cooldowns and restrictions on others.

Pet-cast CC is more limited, and in many cases has been removed.

Cyclone can now be dispelled by immunities and Mass Dispel.

PvP trinkets now grant immunity to reapplication of an effect from the same spell cast when they break abilities with persistent effects, like Solar Beam.

Long fears are now shorter in PvP due to the added benefit of a fear changing the players position.

Additionally, we've significantly reduced the number of throughput-increasing cooldowns and procs in order to further reduce burst damage.

Whether your favorite class is losing an ability or taking a hit to its CC potential, we hope this discussion helped you better understand why we’re making these changes. It’s important to remember that other classes will be getting some of their CC removed too. We think this entire package will make exploring Azeroth and PvPing a more enjoyable experience for everyone, and we’re looking forward to having you try them out when we open up the expansion for testing.

In the next Dev Watercooler, we'll explore the changes coming to health and healing in Warlords of Draenor.

Comments

Comment by Alhazred01

on 2014/02/28 16:12:41

The last thing wow needs is to be more accessible to Removed. There are enough baddies as it is. The complexity is one of the things that keeps fails out of real endgame content, and we don't want them there.

Comment by rehlyihmah

on 2014/02/28 17:55:54

stormlash totem never addded complexity to my fights. remembering its keybind was also not that hard. i'll miss it dearly. i just hope they add that effect to something else, because every little bit helps. :| maybe i'll keep it on cooldown till WoD to honor its memory. :D

but i'll try to keep in mind that there's a whole new addon coming and these changes are not going to be the last and i don't know how things'll turn out and none of us can foresee how these changes will affect the game and...LEAVE MY TOTEMS ALONE!

xD

aanyway, leaving out abilities like this won't get baddies into true endgame content. they'll be stuck in lfr and maybe get to see a !@#$ty normal group sometimes. because they're baddies. they're bad! why'd you invite them...

Comment by Xinfinity

on 2014/02/28 19:33:39

Removed Silence effects from interrupts. Silence effects still exist, but are never attached to an interrupt.Removed all Disarms.

Please at least leave Shadow's Silence as a Silence. The only reason it's even useable on a 45-second CD is that we can use it preemptively.

Also, what exactly am I meant to use Psychic Horror for now?

Comment by luketran98

on 2014/02/28 21:18:49

Remove fear entirely please!

Comment by Womanda

on 2014/02/28 22:09:41

tauren racial is now overpowered to the rest... stamina + 2% crit/heal... dwarf is just 2% dmg. still bending the alliance over the table as usual blizzard. if they were smart they would just remove stat racials. if you're going to give 3 races 1% crit, and 2 others 2% crit... you're just digging a deeper hole.

Comment by Leviatham

on 2014/03/01 03:30:04

Alliance racial skills: +Horde racial skills: --nice work -.-"

Comment by skyspanner

on 2014/03/01 03:53:12

I wish glyph of bear trap was a thing, that'd be amazing

Comment by korseki

on 2014/03/01 06:06:04

Reducing ability bloat is one thing, but their goal is to remove most burst cds and utilities and then procs? And removing raidwide utilities.... so. Different specs and classes now have less abilities to contribute to the raid, will probably be streamlined in terms of damage so every single dps spec is now a streamlined constant damage output ( as opposed to having some burstier ones) with less cc tools to differentiate them. Is the end goal to make every class and spec feel exactly the same?

Comment by 3xploit

on 2014/03/01 08:52:38

Spitting on the corpse while rolling the dice should be a new stat buff.

Comment by TickleMeThrall

on 2014/03/01 10:13:18

Everybody is arguing about human racial, that they dont need pvp trinkets but pvp trinkets have secondary useful stats nowadays, so they are good too.These changes are more for PVE - Horde has mostly nerfs. Why? Look at top PVE guilds much higher % of list is Horde. They have much more useful racials than ali (ok human can remove some CCs from mobs, ...), if there would be no racials, I think it would be almost same % of top PVE guilds on both factions.The best example is troll as the best PVE race. In global troll is in second half of race % list. Why? Racial + 1CD for you during encounter.On the other hand human is for his racial mostly used PVP race. But he would be the most popular ali race even without racial , because it is boring ordinary human, in every game where human is he is the most popular race.Secont best PVP race is undead - racial ...If there would be no racials it would be maybe better and if there would be some they should be only passive little stat bonuses like taurens stam.I think racial changes are right step.But they wont change much in distribution of top PVE players.Lower berserk but still 15% is better than night elfs faster ghost(maybe it could be good if you are wipe contest winner but ...:D)

Sorry, but no. Horde make up the majority of top end PvE'rs and PvP'rs in the United States. In Europe the top end PvE'rs and PvP'rs are majority Alliance.

If you're going to compare the Human racial in PvP you have to compare the trinket you gain. Orcs and Undeads are the most chosen races for Horde in PvP so you have to compare a DPS/health trinket to their racials, like an Orc's Blood Fury. Blood Fury is not as good as the on-use or proc trinket because it scales with level, not gear level.

Comment by Flauros454

on 2014/03/01 14:27:44

come on! why nerfing trolls!

Comment by Raizoka

on 2014/03/01 19:09:58

Blizzard if you read this PLS GIVE A BL TO THE PALADINS AND NAME IT "CALL FOR A CRUSADE" thats all i asked you pls! jajajaja

Comment by OneLonelyPickle

on 2014/03/01 20:20:07

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

Except at the part where they said they're still evaluating Every Man For Himself...

Comment by shamanfang

on 2014/03/01 21:30:04

the only thing i can see from this is theyre homogenizing the classes. Burst dps is awesome, and differentiates a warlock from say, a feral druid. which is also awesome. but if youre smoothing out burst damage, PvP will probably last forever, and youre gonna have to scale the locks lesser abilities up to make up the less bursty chaos bolt hits. or the locks dps is gonna plummet. as well as all other classes that rely on crit, like my disc priest and Atonement, etc.

Enhancement shamans, in my opinion, could use some tweaking. Ascendance is wicked in Elemental spec, but pretty lacklustre as enhance. but its potential is so huge! maybe have it lower the cooldown on Stormstrike when it pops so we can actually USE that sweet Windstrike more than two or three times. i dont know. something balanced, but it has to feel unique and fun. like that nelf racial is sweet. and the tauren buff. things that rely on landscape arent a bad place to start. especially bringing it back to shamans and druids and their natural affinities. maybe have spellcasters find random hotzones or something....though not sure whatd work for melee as an area type thing... =D

Also, i second that call for a Critterpocalypse Trap. the more summons, the better. though, granted, glyph of bear trap is ironic. though id miss the poison damage; undead poisonous bear cubs?

Comment by CrimsonPut

on 2014/03/01 22:58:12

So far the Horde racials are complete garbage.

Comment by Awezug

on 2014/03/02 02:45:03

Great! Thanks!

Comment by BMHunterMain

on 2014/03/02 06:16:39

It would be awesome if they finally brought back Plainsrunning for Tauren, but made it work just like a mount, the way Worgens' Running Wild does.

Comment by zanatorix

on 2014/03/02 08:35:14

Talk about how racials are extremely powerfulMention Troll's berserking and even beast slayingSay nothing of the Human's free pvp trinket slot.Wat.

This would be considered OP if it wasn't on the same CD as every other movement freeing trinket in the game...

The point is not that humans get an "extra" cc breaker.. it's that they can use an "extra" dps trinket instead, aka more burst, more damage and generally just more effective in pvp than most other races.

Comment by Filipse

on 2014/03/02 12:21:16

5% rage/energy isnt realy worth as much as 5% increase to mana on the Gnome Racial, 6 increased rage/energy meter doesnt exactly let you squeeze out even a single or even a half additional ability unlike the mana thing, that and the fact that mana is at full at start, wheras rage needs to be gathered and managed through combat.